Germany is one of the countries hosting the most refugees and asylum seekers worldwide (UNHCR, 2022). Many of them are minors and have the right to attend school immediately after their arrival (Züchner 2017). In the federal education system in Germany the models of educational integration of refugees differ (El Mafaalani et al. 2021). However, the fact that refugees and other newly arrived immigrant children and youth underachieve in compulsory schooling applies to all federal states (ibid.). To understand this, it is fruitful to reconstruct the historical discourse of refugees in education in Germany since World War II by analysing three dispositives of power (Foucault 2020), that frame educational policies: The first one is the invisibility of refugees in German society, including education, once the notion of a 'refugee crisis' disappears from the headlines (Ackermann 2004). The second is the German taboo of racism that prevents critical reflections on the racialisation of refugees. The third dispositive is what I call institutional irresponsibility within the education system that denies the needs the refugees systematically (Wischmann 2022). Data includes political documents such as strategy papers mainly taken from the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK) (Siegling 2019), political statements from stakeholders, teacher organisations, as well as public discourse in media (e. g. Sueddeutsche Zeitung 2022). The corpus of data will be restricted to the years 2015 until today and analysed with critical discourse analysis (Blommaert & Bulcaen 2000; Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine 2017). For each of the three dispositives illustrative examples will be used point out the mechanisms of silencing refugees in education in Germany.

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